Here is further proof that “Consumerization of IT” (CoIT) is a reality. And, that has significantly altered the dynamics of technology adoption. Before I explain this shift, let us look at…

How experts explain technology adoption cycle

The accepted premise is that every new technology goes through the following phases:

Hype: Search for next big thing leads to Hype around any new technology.

Struggle: Adoption of these Bleeding Edge technologies depended on the Visionaries who had the vision, energy and money to make it work.

Success: Mainstream adoption required convincing the Pragmatists who needed success stories and support system around the technology.

Not all technologies made it to mainstream. All these are from the perspective of an enterprise. Consumers had very little role to play in this lifecycle. This underlying theme comes out in both the “Hype Cycle” model used by Gartner since 1995 and the…

1. Accept things and people as they are
Accept that this is another country with its own culture. Sure, half of what Norwegians do is new and strange to you, but for them that is the norm. It is the same all over the world: people do things in a certain way and they are sure this is the only and best way to do it. It is the case for the French, the American, the Kenyans etc. They might know how their neighbouring countries do things, but it stops there.

As a foreigner you have different views obviously. You want to do crazy things such as eat a waffle with ham and cheese on top, spending 30 years in Norway without buying a flat; not breastfeed your kid more than a month; or taking a shower in common garderobe with your swimsuit on because you…

Even for the de facto head of one of the world’s largest family-controlled business empires, Jay Y. Lee, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics [fortune-stock symbol=”SSNLF”], has had a lot on his plate lately. On the same Thursday morning in early June that he breakfasted in Seoul with J.P. Morgan [fortune-stock symbol=”JPM”] CEO Jamie Dimon, for instance, Lee learned that the $26 billion New York hedge fund Elliott Management had launched a surprise attack against him. Elliott wanted to stop Lee from merging two publicly traded pieces of his family’s network of companies, potentially foiling Lee’s plan to consolidate control.

A few weeks later, on the day he turned 47, Lee gave his first-ever nationally televised speech in South Korea to offer an apology—including a symbolic bow—because the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul had failed to contain an outbreak of the deadly Middle East respiratory syndrome virus known as MERS. Not…

About a year ago I wrote a post describing average length of dissertations at the University of Minnesota. I’ve been meaning to expand that post by adding data from masters theses since the methods for gathering/parsing the records are transferable. This post provides some graphics and links to R code for evaluating dissertation (doctorate) and thesis (masters) data from an online database at the University of Minnesota. In addition to describing data from masters theses, I’ve collected the most recent data on dissertations to provide an update on my previous post. I’ve avoided presenting the R code for brevity, but I invite interested readers to have a look at my Github repository where all source code and data are stored. Also, please, please, please note that I’ve since tried to explain that dissertation length is a pretty pointless metric of quality (also noted here), so interpret the data only…